The main difference is that you need actual "PC" pets to fight for you, whereas normal pet classes usually have NPC pets that understand very basic commands and basic reactions based on certain variables.
Healers get into or form a group, have the rest of the party kill for him/her... the party usually protects the healer at all costs, and the healer preps the rest of the party to go kill more things.
IMHO, a healer can be one of the laziest classes to play, AS LONG as you have a good party. Now when it comes to boss kind of fights, the difficulty switches. Tanks and DD's spam away, and healers have to know their role, and mitigate mana, aggro, and keep everyone alive with well timed heals and buffs.
Healers are damned fun to play when you're in the mindset to do so.
"There is only one thing of which I am certain, and that's nothing is certain."
I liked the way Mass Effect did group healing. Most classes could spec into first aid, and the more points you put into it, the more you healed the group. And there was a global group cooldown for heals, so even if two players could heal, only the highest First Aid would be used, and the cooldown was shared between players who could heal.
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I think the idea of tanks, healers and DPS is a strong concept and provides a good framework for group tactics. The problem, in my view, is that roles are far too stylised. I would prefer a system where you have classes that are recognizable as tanks and healers but everyone can tank and heal to some extent. A group's strategy would be for the best tanks to have most of the aggro but at the same time it would be accepted that anyone might have to tank depending on how a fight goes and anyone might have to heal if the situation demands.
One of the problems with healing in MMOs is that far too much of it is done in combat and this has a number of negative effects:
- It makes tanks and healers essential for survival which can make it hard to put groups together.
- It reduces the role of the tank to that of a lightning rod, attracting as much of the damage and healing as possible. No matter if the tank is taking ridiculous damage as long as the healing is equally good.
- It reduces the healer's gameplay to whack-a-mole with health bars.
The real villain of the piece though is the health bar, which if you think about it is a totally abstract and fairly meaningless concept. No one goes to a doctor and says 'I need treatment my health is below 50%!'. I'd love to see a system where a blow represents an actual wound. It might be nothing more than a scratch, a broken leg which incapacitates the tank or a gaping cut which requires the tank to immediately disengage and seek aid while others occupy the enemy. The healer would then have to diagnose the injury and select a treatment depending on the situation.
In raids in particular this could lead to some very interesting dynamics. With several raiders injured the healers would effectively have a triage situation, selecting treatments not just on the basis of the wound but also dependent on the number of other patients and the urgency of getting particular people back into the fight.
To give an example: In the middle of a fight a medic finds himself with two tanks to heal. One simply requires a bandage and can be put back in the fight fairly quickly. The other requires extensive treatment but will die if he does not receive immediate attention. So the healer has four choices:
- Concentrate on the critical patient, meaning that both are out of the fight for quite a while.
- Concentrate on getting one tank back in the fight, letting the other one die.
- Stabilize the critical patient, then get the other tank back in the fight.
- Try to get help from another healer.
No strategy guide can tell you the right answer because it depends entirely on the availability of other healers and the situation in the fight.
I think these kinds of mechanics would make fights much less repetitive because different situations would always be arising. The role of the healers in particular would a lot more interesting, requiring awareness and good judgement rather than just the ability to click on a health bar.
To begin, this thread is just theory and speculation only (with a little bit of fun, hopefully!). The general situation I'm presenting within an MMORPG in general is: How would a game be impacted by removing Healers from an MMORPG completely? Good or bad?
NOTE: I'm thinking Healers as a class mainly
Personally, I think it'll create dynamics normally not found in games if Healers were eliminated with more emphasis on surviving rather than making up the damage. I can imagine a game working fairly well with absolutely no Healer class but with very limited healing abilities (potions or bandaids etc.). Your health all of a sudden becomes a very important aspect of the game and I'm sure people will be finding ways to mitigate damage while still trying to function within the roles they specialize in. I think the game would be unconventional in terms of balancing out different ability sets/classes, but perhaps it could make it easier as well since we are also removing a dynamic that is usually accounted for.
I can also see more emphasis on different types of group tactics used, some immediate thoughts come to mind such as a stout Warrior helping a Mage friend by helping shield and taking damage for him while the Mage pelts a raid boss with fireballs and having to spread damage around more evenly to keep from anyone dying during an encounter maybe by a group effort of kiting while dodging huge blizzards (and perhaps utilizing a more complex aggro system). These are just some of the thoughts that come to mind when I think of it.
What about your thoughts if any? Good or bad, should there be a game that takes a Healer position completely out of the picture.
I think it could be a good thing provided that the classes combat were altered in such a way that players weren't being 2 shot only to run out and be 2 shot again only to run out...
If players can somehow be allowed self heals or if stopping behind cover could help regen some health then it might be able to work.
Or depending on the game they can have bandages or some such thing.
of course that means players who like to be healers would be completely out of luck.
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Its like people can't think of how the mechanics would change to accommodate certain hypothetical situations.
This thread being a good example. If there were no healers, I assume we still have potions, bandages and the like, I don't think a game would be a "zerg fest", if you took healing out of a prexisting game sure but you would have to think the game would be designed from the ground up with the concept in mind, as such I would expect damage mitigation and avoidance the be the goal, instead constantly healing people.
The focus would probably be a struggle to buff your defense and weaken your opponents, tanks would be more important than before, as would good buffers and debuffers. Crowd control would probably be very important too. And everybody would be more concerned about personal defense, not just by way of armor, but stealth, kiting, crowd control, health regen etc. now that you don't have someone to fix you up if you screw up.
I think it could lead to some really interesting situations and would certainly be a change of pace.
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You can complete most of the City of Heroes content without a healer. This game has fun group play. In addition, you do not sit around all day waiting for a group because almost any combination of classes will work. City of Heroes has proven that it can be done successfully.
I doubt that healer roles will be removed totally from most games,
However, group game play does not have to be designed in a way that makes particular classes essential.
One of the most common looking for group advertisements is "Group ready to go. Just need 1 'class x' to start."
Far be it from me to discourage game developers from "thinking outside the box" and trying to come up with different ways of doing things, but eliminating the so called holy trinity I can really see going in two directions.
First, as long as you have a system where there are different group roles, there is always going to be one role that is less popular, and in shorter supply, thus a roadblock to forming groups. Healers have been the emphasis here, but I've been on as many games/servers where it was the tanks that were hard to come by. Get rid of tanks/healers/dps altogether and replace them with group functions A, B, and C (insert names here), and likely C will be less popular, and you will be looking at someone shouting "LFM 4/5, just need a C'er and gtg".
Okay, so some are suggesting doing away with group roles all together, ie any 5-6 people will do. Though it would certainly make forming groups easier, I see some unfortunate consequences. To make this sort of thing work, either you would have to dumb down group encounters significantly, or you have to make classes extremely generic (if you even keep classes at all), neither of which is desirable imho. Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but I like individuality in PCs (I'm not talking different hair color/styles here), and I already think too many games have the "one warrior is just like another warrior" mentality, with little ability to customize yourself in meanful ways. The last thing many of us want is to go further down the "cookie cutter toon" road.
Its like asking if you can have an MMO without the "trinity".. obviously yes you can.
Ultima Online had no definition of:
Tank
Healer
DPS (magic/melee)
At least when I still played.. I have no idea how messed up it might be now.
You healed with potions if you had them.. magic if you had the skill to cast.
Later they added bandages.. which to work really well required a few skills. No one spammed "need someone who can heal".
Of course that was my favorite MMO... but you can't remove healing entirely... you could remove the class as you can remove the entire trinity and basicly make modern Ultima Online.
I just grow tired of the tank/dps/heal method. It's gotten rather boring as far as pve goes. I don't think removing healers would be a good thing though. I have solutions in mind but I'm way too lazy to type them up in a cess pool of a forum such as this one. Though as people have said, there are people that like to heal. However I think it's the holy trinity that is the problem or how people design fights around it rather.
It's good to see the industry try new things, however new things aren't necessarily as fun as the old.
I made a suggestion not too long ago where:
all mobs in an MMORPG "call for help", which causes nearby enemies to assist and dramatically increases fight difficulty - in certain areas it's impossible to fight effectively without some way of dealing with the calls.
a mage variant exists: Silencers. They use magic to silence foes, preventing calls for help.
This creates a "need" to deal with a specific mechanic which makes fights harder. And each class in the game would vary in how they could deal with that new need, with a few classes being better at it than others. This is exactly like taking damage creates a need for healing, and High Mob DPS creates a need for tanking.
The problem is it's completely arbitrary. Heavily armored knights were sent to the frontlines in real life. Healers were used in real life too (albeit not during battle while under attack.) But Silencer mages are completely fabricated. This will seriously hamper the mechanic's fun factor for many players.
Arbitrary mechanics won't inherently fail, but they have to overcome hurdles of accessibility and believability for players to accept them. Accessibility refers to players intuitively knowing that the guy encased in 100lbs of steel is probably the one you want to put on the frontlines, but a game would have to specifically teach players that Silencers are important because they don't exist in real life. Believability refers to the rejection (or distaste) of game mechanics because they're perceived completely fabricated or imaginary - it impacts all players to varying degrees (some dislike any magic; some are willing to believe magic if it's explained adequately; some are willing to accept "but it's magic" as explanation for anything.)
Another problem is: is silencing foes as fun as DPSing? Is it at least as fun (hopefully more) than tanking or healing? The exact implementation would determine this, but it's the bar you have to reach to attain success.
So the simple version of what I've described above is:
Sure. Healers can be removed as long as they're replaced with something at least as fun.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
So the simple version of what I've described above is:
Sure. Healers can be removed as long as they're replaced with something at least as fun.
Oh, but what if a game was built with no healing mechanic in mind? How would the game end up? Would an additional role/s surface as a result from not having any heals which focus around survival?
I like the responses this thread has gotten and a majority of the responses seem to perceive healing as a necessary thing either stated or implied. When I was typing this thread up originally, I was thinking also about STO, how they seem to be trying to apply some version of the trinity in their ships even. I was just curious about people's perception of being without the whole trinity.
I ultimately came up with this thread thinking about combat and I feel that ultimately, healing is not a necessity in a game and personally to me, it just seems too simple of a system. Could removing healing create a new dynamics? I figured I would post to stir up some ideas on how this would even be implemented. Personally, I was seeing more niche playstyles being filled, but perhaps more individuality in terms of having to worry about one's own survival. Then, I can see that linked in group play in terms of having to help other people also worry about their survival, maybe implement different and unique ways for each type of playstyle/class to save each other -- Warriors shield blocking for their buddies, rogues disarming weapons off other foes, mages teleporting a friend to safety, etc. Of course, that was only my perception of how it could work (probably in an ideal world too) and definitely good to see other responses and perceptions
First, let me say like the other poster a few pages back... I find myself drawn exclusively to healing classes. Although, not usually the "priest", far more often the druid/shaman types with less of the creepy organized religion feel. I just don't like the class back story for priests, generally. Like that other poster, I will say that any game that didn't have a healing class I'd never play.
As evidence of that I've looked at F2P games, which cost me nothing but time to try out... and if they only have the "organized religion" priest for a healer. Guess what? I never get interested enough to try it.
That being said, I agree that depending on the setting of the game the traditional in-battle healer doesn't make sense. For sci-fi or realism games, it makes far more sense to have say... out of battle healing options. Where if you're engaged in a fight you cannot heal, or that all heals are"heal over time" atop that. These would be more like "medic" skill sets that any player could use. Meaning injuries that cause blood loss could have the bleeding stopped if the medic runs up and tends you duringhte fight, but the wounded person doesn't then regain health... they'd just get tossed back into the fight.
Worst situations would be things like having your melee fighter break a leg, or having your ranged sniper get their arm broken. These things would essentially put them out of the fight, other than as a sitting duck and moving target respectively.
Would this lead to different play styles, certainly. If your medic cannot set your broken limbs and use a technological tricorder device of some sort to mend the bone and tissue until the shit storm has calmed down, you'd damn well need to be more careful in the fights. I don't think doing away with healing all together would be terribly great though. Then you'd have to wonder about things like how death affects players, they may just kamikaze and then run back into the instance or back to the fight in some cases.
healers are used so games can implement elite mobs that take 300 hits to kill. I HATE that more than anything else. I cant stand how some MMO's base end game off "Elite" mobs basically meaning they hit way too hard and have way to many hit points. I'd personally rather some mobs hit hard but die a lot easier and players die because they dont have group heals or massive heals on them. Thats far more challenging than the typical sit back and spam heals... OMG... so challenging. Personal Banadaging or health pots should be it.
"Sometimes people say stuff they don''t mean, but more often then that they don''t say things they do mean"
I'm against lessening variety. We should be asking for more classes with degrees of subtlety between them. Or just go classless and let the players build the chars they want like you could pre-nge swg, or eve.
I would love a MMO without any magic whatsoever. That would of course force the developer to make a more dynamic and realistic combat system. Maybe a historical MMO or just a low fantasy one.
I think it would be a bad idea to remove healers from all MMOs but for a few it is good. I would also like to have a game focused more on stealth, traps and intelligence and less on regular DPS.
Theif online or something like that.
I think todays MMOs goes more and more on just DPs while still using the old tank and spank AI, not really a good thing. Better AI, more choices for combat styles and more realistic combats. More doesn't mean 100% realism of course, that is both impossible and boring but 20% instead of 0 would be nice.
And with no healers I also means no pots. That forces you to not get injured or face the consequences.
To begin, this thread is just theory and speculation only (with a little bit of fun, hopefully!). The general situation I'm presenting within an MMORPG in general is: How would a game be impacted by removing Healers from an MMORPG completely? Good or bad?
NOTE: I'm thinking Healers as a class mainly
Personally, I think it'll create dynamics normally not found in games if Healers were eliminated with more emphasis on surviving rather than making up the damage. I can imagine a game working fairly well with absolutely no Healer class but with very limited healing abilities (potions or bandaids etc.). Your health all of a sudden becomes a very important aspect of the game and I'm sure people will be finding ways to mitigate damage while still trying to function within the roles they specialize in. I think the game would be unconventional in terms of balancing out different ability sets/classes, but perhaps it could make it easier as well since we are also removing a dynamic that is usually accounted for.
I can also see more emphasis on different types of group tactics used, some immediate thoughts come to mind such as a stout Warrior helping a Mage friend by helping shield and taking damage for him while the Mage pelts a raid boss with fireballs and having to spread damage around more evenly to keep from anyone dying during an encounter maybe by a group effort of kiting while dodging huge blizzards (and perhaps utilizing a more complex aggro system). These are just some of the thoughts that come to mind when I think of it.
What about your thoughts if any? Good or bad, should there be a game that takes a Healer position completely out of the picture.
For Pvp instant heals got to go, pve fine but when It's Player vs Player instant heals have no room in balance, If heals are to be in the game they need a cast time and a side effect, Like heals on a Alli or self also regain your enemy health by 10% of that heal , ,that way a non healers vs a healer will have a chance.... Thats for Free MMO Dev.
So the simple version of what I've described above is:
Sure. Healers can be removed as long as they're replaced with something at least as fun.
Oh, but what if a game was built with no healing mechanic in mind? How would the game end up? Would an additional role/s surface as a result from not having any heals which focus around survival?
Creating a game from scratch without healing is what I meant by that statement. Having healing, then removing it is a SWG-class mistake (because the people who didn't like your game have already left and aren't coming back...and the players who remain actually like your current mechanics for the most part.)
If we're assuming everything else is unchanged, the removal of healing as a role wouldn't add roles to the game (although the remaining roles would shift to fill the void) so it would almost certainly create a void in gameplay depth. That void would need to be filled with something, or you'd simply have a shallower game. Adding new roles would be an intentional design choice, and would be one way a game might survive without healers (although it'd face the challenges I mentioned in my previous post.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I would love a MMO without any magic whatsoever. That would of course force the developer to make a more dynamic and realistic combat system. Maybe a historical MMO or just a low fantasy one. I think it would be a bad idea to remove healers from all MMOs but for a few it is good. I would also like to have a game focused more on stealth, traps and intelligence and less on regular DPS. Theif online or something like that. I think todays MMOs goes more and more on just DPs while still using the old tank and spank AI, not really a good thing. Better AI, more choices for combat styles and more realistic combats. More doesn't mean 100% realism of course, that is both impossible and boring but 20% instead of 0 would be nice. And with no healers I also means no pots. That forces you to not get injured or face the consequences.
Im all for this idea of Thief Online. Maybe something like Bounty Hunter Online, Ala Indiana Jones and Matthew Rielly's books style. Create tons of Dungeons filled with traps but no monsters, maybe some animals here and there. =D
I suppose having no healing would make things a little interesting... the idea of micro-management, say, in Starcraft, comes to mind.
In Starcraft, say I have a pack of marines (ranged dps) fighting, of, a pack of zerglings (melee dps). A pack being about 12.
If a player is using the attack-move command, the AI has a way of choosing who it attacks - at first, it attacks whatever it sees. If it is attacked by something, it will go for whoever attacked it. If it is attacked by several things, it will go for the closest.
Anyway, with that sort of AI, the closest player who is attacking an enemy with other players, would be attacked first by the enemy. After that player has taken a bit of damage, they could run away, and the AI would go "wait, he isn't attacking me. He is using the "move" command - but several enemies are attacking me now, so I will attack the closest of them!" and the encounter would continue...
This form of movement-tanking, I suppose you could call it, could be interesting for an MMO to try to achieve. They would have to explain it well, though - probably with little "tanking" tutorial missions/quests, or something along those lines.
In World of Warcraft - hunters can use "distracting shot" to effectively "grab aggro" from another hunter - with about three or four hunters (in a large enough room), you can kill a melee boss.
Adding in more interesting ways to encounter and kill monsters and enemies would be good, and I would love to see some of them.
(And no, god no, I would not just cut the healer out of the Holy Trinity and see what happens, if anyone's thinking that. Ack. Tanks and DPS is just... terrible.)
I am playing EVE and it's alright... level V skills are a bit much.
Why remove? they are there for people to choose...if you dont wanna play a healer dont...but some people do..its a choice
If they remove healers then people wont have a choice
I think and feel this way about it too. We need MORE class options, not less. And eliminating a class archetype that many people enjoy playing....doesn't seem like an improvement, to me.
Sure...I think class mechanics probably need a good overhaul in some games, but taking CHOICES away, when it comes to gaming....I don't see that as any kind of improvement.
Comments
I always saw "Healer" as a pet class, honestly.
The main difference is that you need actual "PC" pets to fight for you, whereas normal pet classes usually have NPC pets that understand very basic commands and basic reactions based on certain variables.
Healers get into or form a group, have the rest of the party kill for him/her... the party usually protects the healer at all costs, and the healer preps the rest of the party to go kill more things.
IMHO, a healer can be one of the laziest classes to play, AS LONG as you have a good party. Now when it comes to boss kind of fights, the difficulty switches. Tanks and DD's spam away, and healers have to know their role, and mitigate mana, aggro, and keep everyone alive with well timed heals and buffs.
Healers are damned fun to play when you're in the mindset to do so.
"There is only one thing of which I am certain, and that's nothing is certain."
I liked the way Mass Effect did group healing. Most classes could spec into first aid, and the more points you put into it, the more you healed the group. And there was a global group cooldown for heals, so even if two players could heal, only the highest First Aid would be used, and the cooldown was shared between players who could heal.
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A lot of people like playing as a healer. It will loose a good bunch of playerbase.
I think the idea of tanks, healers and DPS is a strong concept and provides a good framework for group tactics. The problem, in my view, is that roles are far too stylised. I would prefer a system where you have classes that are recognizable as tanks and healers but everyone can tank and heal to some extent. A group's strategy would be for the best tanks to have most of the aggro but at the same time it would be accepted that anyone might have to tank depending on how a fight goes and anyone might have to heal if the situation demands.
One of the problems with healing in MMOs is that far too much of it is done in combat and this has a number of negative effects:
- It makes tanks and healers essential for survival which can make it hard to put groups together.
- It reduces the role of the tank to that of a lightning rod, attracting as much of the damage and healing as possible. No matter if the tank is taking ridiculous damage as long as the healing is equally good.
- It reduces the healer's gameplay to whack-a-mole with health bars.
The real villain of the piece though is the health bar, which if you think about it is a totally abstract and fairly meaningless concept. No one goes to a doctor and says 'I need treatment my health is below 50%!'. I'd love to see a system where a blow represents an actual wound. It might be nothing more than a scratch, a broken leg which incapacitates the tank or a gaping cut which requires the tank to immediately disengage and seek aid while others occupy the enemy. The healer would then have to diagnose the injury and select a treatment depending on the situation.
In raids in particular this could lead to some very interesting dynamics. With several raiders injured the healers would effectively have a triage situation, selecting treatments not just on the basis of the wound but also dependent on the number of other patients and the urgency of getting particular people back into the fight.
To give an example: In the middle of a fight a medic finds himself with two tanks to heal. One simply requires a bandage and can be put back in the fight fairly quickly. The other requires extensive treatment but will die if he does not receive immediate attention. So the healer has four choices:
- Concentrate on the critical patient, meaning that both are out of the fight for quite a while.
- Concentrate on getting one tank back in the fight, letting the other one die.
- Stabilize the critical patient, then get the other tank back in the fight.
- Try to get help from another healer.
No strategy guide can tell you the right answer because it depends entirely on the availability of other healers and the situation in the fight.
I think these kinds of mechanics would make fights much less repetitive because different situations would always be arising. The role of the healers in particular would a lot more interesting, requiring awareness and good judgement rather than just the ability to click on a health bar.
I think it could be a good thing provided that the classes combat were altered in such a way that players weren't being 2 shot only to run out and be 2 shot again only to run out...
If players can somehow be allowed self heals or if stopping behind cover could help regen some health then it might be able to work.
Or depending on the game they can have bandages or some such thing.
of course that means players who like to be healers would be completely out of luck.
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Its like people can't think of how the mechanics would change to accommodate certain hypothetical situations.
This thread being a good example. If there were no healers, I assume we still have potions, bandages and the like, I don't think a game would be a "zerg fest", if you took healing out of a prexisting game sure but you would have to think the game would be designed from the ground up with the concept in mind, as such I would expect damage mitigation and avoidance the be the goal, instead constantly healing people.
The focus would probably be a struggle to buff your defense and weaken your opponents, tanks would be more important than before, as would good buffers and debuffers. Crowd control would probably be very important too. And everybody would be more concerned about personal defense, not just by way of armor, but stealth, kiting, crowd control, health regen etc. now that you don't have someone to fix you up if you screw up.
I think it could lead to some really interesting situations and would certainly be a change of pace.
Don't you worry little buddy. You're dealing with a man of honor. However, honor requires a higher percentage of profit
You can complete most of the City of Heroes content without a healer. This game has fun group play. In addition, you do not sit around all day waiting for a group because almost any combination of classes will work. City of Heroes has proven that it can be done successfully.
I doubt that healer roles will be removed totally from most games,
However, group game play does not have to be designed in a way that makes particular classes essential.
One of the most common looking for group advertisements is "Group ready to go. Just need 1 'class x' to start."
Its like starting a rock band without drums, lead guitar or singer, it could work out but the curve for the success will be harder.
MMO structure is the same as a rock band, its a team work, a synergy between the members of the group. I cant imagine
The Beatles without Ringo,George,Paul or a John Lennon, they wouldn't be one of the most respectable band of all times.
Ringo the healer, George and Paul the dps and John the warrior lol....
Far be it from me to discourage game developers from "thinking outside the box" and trying to come up with different ways of doing things, but eliminating the so called holy trinity I can really see going in two directions.
First, as long as you have a system where there are different group roles, there is always going to be one role that is less popular, and in shorter supply, thus a roadblock to forming groups. Healers have been the emphasis here, but I've been on as many games/servers where it was the tanks that were hard to come by. Get rid of tanks/healers/dps altogether and replace them with group functions A, B, and C (insert names here), and likely C will be less popular, and you will be looking at someone shouting "LFM 4/5, just need a C'er and gtg".
Okay, so some are suggesting doing away with group roles all together, ie any 5-6 people will do. Though it would certainly make forming groups easier, I see some unfortunate consequences. To make this sort of thing work, either you would have to dumb down group encounters significantly, or you have to make classes extremely generic (if you even keep classes at all), neither of which is desirable imho. Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but I like individuality in PCs (I'm not talking different hair color/styles here), and I already think too many games have the "one warrior is just like another warrior" mentality, with little ability to customize yourself in meanful ways. The last thing many of us want is to go further down the "cookie cutter toon" road.
Just my two cents...
The only way to remove healers in a game would be to give everyone some kind of healing ability. Or make the game all skill based, not level based.
Its like asking if you can have an MMO without the "trinity".. obviously yes you can.
Ultima Online had no definition of:
Tank
Healer
DPS (magic/melee)
At least when I still played.. I have no idea how messed up it might be now.
You healed with potions if you had them.. magic if you had the skill to cast.
Later they added bandages.. which to work really well required a few skills. No one spammed "need someone who can heal".
Of course that was my favorite MMO... but you can't remove healing entirely... you could remove the class as you can remove the entire trinity and basicly make modern Ultima Online.
Perhaps they could instate a more realistic healer system. Wounded players could find a healer, who's powers take 3-5 days to work and cost 5000 plat
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Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
I just grow tired of the tank/dps/heal method. It's gotten rather boring as far as pve goes. I don't think removing healers would be a good thing though. I have solutions in mind but I'm way too lazy to type them up in a cess pool of a forum such as this one. Though as people have said, there are people that like to heal. However I think it's the holy trinity that is the problem or how people design fights around it rather.
Then people would whine and want the Obama system! ( I had to say it guys)
It's good to see the industry try new things, however new things aren't necessarily as fun as the old.
I made a suggestion not too long ago where:
This creates a "need" to deal with a specific mechanic which makes fights harder. And each class in the game would vary in how they could deal with that new need, with a few classes being better at it than others. This is exactly like taking damage creates a need for healing, and High Mob DPS creates a need for tanking.
The problem is it's completely arbitrary. Heavily armored knights were sent to the frontlines in real life. Healers were used in real life too (albeit not during battle while under attack.) But Silencer mages are completely fabricated. This will seriously hamper the mechanic's fun factor for many players.
Arbitrary mechanics won't inherently fail, but they have to overcome hurdles of accessibility and believability for players to accept them. Accessibility refers to players intuitively knowing that the guy encased in 100lbs of steel is probably the one you want to put on the frontlines, but a game would have to specifically teach players that Silencers are important because they don't exist in real life. Believability refers to the rejection (or distaste) of game mechanics because they're perceived completely fabricated or imaginary - it impacts all players to varying degrees (some dislike any magic; some are willing to believe magic if it's explained adequately; some are willing to accept "but it's magic" as explanation for anything.)
Another problem is: is silencing foes as fun as DPSing? Is it at least as fun (hopefully more) than tanking or healing? The exact implementation would determine this, but it's the bar you have to reach to attain success.
So the simple version of what I've described above is:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Oh, but what if a game was built with no healing mechanic in mind? How would the game end up? Would an additional role/s surface as a result from not having any heals which focus around survival?
I like the responses this thread has gotten and a majority of the responses seem to perceive healing as a necessary thing either stated or implied. When I was typing this thread up originally, I was thinking also about STO, how they seem to be trying to apply some version of the trinity in their ships even. I was just curious about people's perception of being without the whole trinity.
I ultimately came up with this thread thinking about combat and I feel that ultimately, healing is not a necessity in a game and personally to me, it just seems too simple of a system. Could removing healing create a new dynamics? I figured I would post to stir up some ideas on how this would even be implemented. Personally, I was seeing more niche playstyles being filled, but perhaps more individuality in terms of having to worry about one's own survival. Then, I can see that linked in group play in terms of having to help other people also worry about their survival, maybe implement different and unique ways for each type of playstyle/class to save each other -- Warriors shield blocking for their buddies, rogues disarming weapons off other foes, mages teleporting a friend to safety, etc. Of course, that was only my perception of how it could work (probably in an ideal world too) and definitely good to see other responses and perceptions
First, let me say like the other poster a few pages back... I find myself drawn exclusively to healing classes. Although, not usually the "priest", far more often the druid/shaman types with less of the creepy organized religion feel. I just don't like the class back story for priests, generally. Like that other poster, I will say that any game that didn't have a healing class I'd never play.
As evidence of that I've looked at F2P games, which cost me nothing but time to try out... and if they only have the "organized religion" priest for a healer. Guess what? I never get interested enough to try it.
That being said, I agree that depending on the setting of the game the traditional in-battle healer doesn't make sense. For sci-fi or realism games, it makes far more sense to have say... out of battle healing options. Where if you're engaged in a fight you cannot heal, or that all heals are"heal over time" atop that. These would be more like "medic" skill sets that any player could use. Meaning injuries that cause blood loss could have the bleeding stopped if the medic runs up and tends you duringhte fight, but the wounded person doesn't then regain health... they'd just get tossed back into the fight.
Worst situations would be things like having your melee fighter break a leg, or having your ranged sniper get their arm broken. These things would essentially put them out of the fight, other than as a sitting duck and moving target respectively.
Would this lead to different play styles, certainly. If your medic cannot set your broken limbs and use a technological tricorder device of some sort to mend the bone and tissue until the shit storm has calmed down, you'd damn well need to be more careful in the fights. I don't think doing away with healing all together would be terribly great though. Then you'd have to wonder about things like how death affects players, they may just kamikaze and then run back into the instance or back to the fight in some cases.
healers are used so games can implement elite mobs that take 300 hits to kill. I HATE that more than anything else. I cant stand how some MMO's base end game off "Elite" mobs basically meaning they hit way too hard and have way to many hit points. I'd personally rather some mobs hit hard but die a lot easier and players die because they dont have group heals or massive heals on them. Thats far more challenging than the typical sit back and spam heals... OMG... so challenging. Personal Banadaging or health pots should be it.
"Sometimes people say stuff they don''t mean, but more often then that they don''t say things they do mean"
I'm against lessening variety. We should be asking for more classes with degrees of subtlety between them. Or just go classless and let the players build the chars they want like you could pre-nge swg, or eve.
I would love a MMO without any magic whatsoever. That would of course force the developer to make a more dynamic and realistic combat system. Maybe a historical MMO or just a low fantasy one.
I think it would be a bad idea to remove healers from all MMOs but for a few it is good. I would also like to have a game focused more on stealth, traps and intelligence and less on regular DPS.
Theif online or something like that.
I think todays MMOs goes more and more on just DPs while still using the old tank and spank AI, not really a good thing. Better AI, more choices for combat styles and more realistic combats. More doesn't mean 100% realism of course, that is both impossible and boring but 20% instead of 0 would be nice.
And with no healers I also means no pots. That forces you to not get injured or face the consequences.
For Pvp instant heals got to go, pve fine but when It's Player vs Player instant heals have no room in balance, If heals are to be in the game they need a cast time and a side effect, Like heals on a Alli or self also regain your enemy health by 10% of that heal , ,that way a non healers vs a healer will have a chance.... Thats for Free MMO Dev.
Oh, but what if a game was built with no healing mechanic in mind? How would the game end up? Would an additional role/s surface as a result from not having any heals which focus around survival?
Creating a game from scratch without healing is what I meant by that statement. Having healing, then removing it is a SWG-class mistake (because the people who didn't like your game have already left and aren't coming back...and the players who remain actually like your current mechanics for the most part.)
If we're assuming everything else is unchanged, the removal of healing as a role wouldn't add roles to the game (although the remaining roles would shift to fill the void) so it would almost certainly create a void in gameplay depth. That void would need to be filled with something, or you'd simply have a shallower game. Adding new roles would be an intentional design choice, and would be one way a game might survive without healers (although it'd face the challenges I mentioned in my previous post.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Im all for this idea of Thief Online. Maybe something like Bounty Hunter Online, Ala Indiana Jones and Matthew Rielly's books style. Create tons of Dungeons filled with traps but no monsters, maybe some animals here and there. =D
I suppose having no healing would make things a little interesting... the idea of micro-management, say, in Starcraft, comes to mind.
In Starcraft, say I have a pack of marines (ranged dps) fighting, of, a pack of zerglings (melee dps). A pack being about 12.
If a player is using the attack-move command, the AI has a way of choosing who it attacks - at first, it attacks whatever it sees. If it is attacked by something, it will go for whoever attacked it. If it is attacked by several things, it will go for the closest.
www.youtube.com/watch <- Terran Micro-management techniques, if you're interested.
Anyway, with that sort of AI, the closest player who is attacking an enemy with other players, would be attacked first by the enemy. After that player has taken a bit of damage, they could run away, and the AI would go "wait, he isn't attacking me. He is using the "move" command - but several enemies are attacking me now, so I will attack the closest of them!" and the encounter would continue...
This form of movement-tanking, I suppose you could call it, could be interesting for an MMO to try to achieve. They would have to explain it well, though - probably with little "tanking" tutorial missions/quests, or something along those lines.
In World of Warcraft - hunters can use "distracting shot" to effectively "grab aggro" from another hunter - with about three or four hunters (in a large enough room), you can kill a melee boss.
Adding in more interesting ways to encounter and kill monsters and enemies would be good, and I would love to see some of them.
(And no, god no, I would not just cut the healer out of the Holy Trinity and see what happens, if anyone's thinking that. Ack. Tanks and DPS is just... terrible.)
I am playing EVE and it's alright... level V skills are a bit much.
You all need to learn to spell.
I think and feel this way about it too. We need MORE class options, not less. And eliminating a class archetype that many people enjoy playing....doesn't seem like an improvement, to me.
Sure...I think class mechanics probably need a good overhaul in some games, but taking CHOICES away, when it comes to gaming....I don't see that as any kind of improvement.
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